Time - Hours, Minutes and Seconds - Planning

The Year 4 summer curriculum on time focuses on understanding hours, minutes, and seconds during the first week. In this engaging lesson, students are first introduced to key vocabulary such as 'time', 'equivalence', and 'convert', with resources available to reinforce their understanding. The class starts with a practical demonstration using a timer or stopwatch to explore what happens when the count goes beyond 59 seconds. Students are encouraged to use a bar model to visualise and remember that 1 minute is equivalent to 60 seconds, reinforcing the concept of equivalence.

Students then move on to group activities, where they categorise various tasks based on whether they take an hour, a minute, or a second to complete, even testing some tasks like tying shoelaces against the clock. The lesson progresses with exercises to convert minutes to hours and seconds to minutes, using bar models and sentence stems to aid comprehension. This hands-on approach helps students understand the relationship between different units of time. The lesson concludes with independent work, differentiated by ability, where children convert units of time with varying degrees of complexity, from simple consecutive orders to complex calculations. Throughout the lesson, students reflect on what they've learned, the skills they've used, and what they found challenging, ensuring they remember key takeaways about converting time measurements.